Component taping and sequencing machines are widely used in the electronics industry. Electronic components are frequently taped into continuous bands for purposes of storage and distribution and/or to form an input media to the automated equipment which inserts components into printed circuit boards as part of the manufacture of electronic equipment.
Component taping machines generally fall into two categories. The first category includes those machines which are designed to produce a continuous stream of identical components. These machines are generally referred to as taping machines. Most of the machines found in the prior art which fall into this category are elaborate, high-speed devices which are usually used by large electronic component manufacturers to package their products. These machines, however, while very efficient, are often too costly and require too much maintenance to be affordable by small distributors of electronic components who would have use for such machines in supplying limited quantities of taped components to their customers.
The other type of component taping machines are referred to as sequencing machines. These machines are again usually highly-automated devices which are adapted to automatically select components from a plurality of sources in a predetermined sequence and to thereafter tape these components into a continuous band. Such bands are then utilized in the manufacture of printed circuit boards. The automated component inserting equipment used in the manufacture of printed circuit boards typically cuts the components from the taped bands and sequentially inserts the components into the printed circuit boards in the order in which they are taped together. These machines are also usually expensive, complicated devices which are unaffordable by manufacturers of low-volume, special-purpose printed circuit boards who typically need to sequentially tape only a few hundred components.
Few machines exist which are easily adapted to both the taping of a series of identical components into a continuous band and to the taping of a plurality of different components in predetermined sequence on a continuous band. Of necessity, such machines must be manually fed to allow a human operator to supply either identical components or a predetermined sequence of different components to the machine. In those machines which are adapted for manual feeding, most are rather unsophisticated insofar as they are not easily adjusted to handle various sizes of components, suffer from tape misalignment problems, are usable only with small-diameter reels of tape, and typically do not remove the end portions of the component leads extending past the boundaries of the component band.
A machine which would allow either the repetitive taping of a single component or a sequential taping of a series of components in a simple and efficient manner would find wide use in the electronics industry, not only for the distribution of small quantities of components, but also in the production of specialized low-quantity printed circuit boards, wherein the sophistication of the high-speed sequencing machines is not needed.
Accordingly, it is the principal object of this invention to tape electronic components in a simple and efficient manner.
It is another object of this invention to provide the capability to repetitively tape identical components, and to sequentially tape a plurality of different components.
It is still another object of this invention to provide a manually-fed component taping machine utilizing a simple design requiring little maintenance.
It is another object of this invention to provide a component taping machine capable of using large reels of adhesive tape, to thereby produce a longer band of taped components.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a component taping machine which is easily adapted to tape various sizes of components.
It is another object of this invention to prevent misalignment of the adhesive tape in a component taping machine.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a component taping machine which is simple to operate and quickly tapes electronic components.